Thursday, October 30, 2014

In its
recent article, the Huffington Post unearthed a previously unknown
chapter in Andy Stern’s corporate career at SIGA Technologies, a
bio-warfare pharmaceutical company.

It turns out that soon after journalist Ryan
Grim published a 2010 article outing Stern for an allegedly corrupt
backroom deal with billionaire Ron Perelman (“Andy
Stern's Bizarre Alliance With Private Equity and Biowarfare,” October 7,
2010), Stern and SIGA hired a fancy corporate law firm to try to bully the
Huffington Post into silence.

In their recent article, Grim and fellow journalist
Jeffrey Young describe how SIGA’s lawyers threatened to sue the Huffington Post unless the news outlet deleted Grim’s article discussing Stern's
allegedly corrupt deal with Perelman… in which Stern and SEIU abandoned 10,000 security
guards who work for AlliedBarton. Just weeks after Stern resigned as SEIU's president, Perelman appointed him to SIGA Technologies board of directors where Stern pocketed tens of thousands of stock options and buckets of cash.

Below, Tasty has posted a copy of the lawyers'
bullyboy letter sent to the Huffington Post… which appears to have been taken from Chapter
1 of a scare-tactic handbook.

Here's how the scare tactic works.

After a
fatcat is stung by the truth, he hires lawyers with super scary-looking
letterhead and tells them to send an “I'm going to sue the f*ck out of you” letter
to the journalist. The fatcat hopes the journalist will tremble in his boots… and
quickly agree to delete the article rather than risk an expensive battle
with testosterone-filled attorneys.

In this case, the Huffington Post called Stern on his bluff and forced SEIU’s President Emeritus to slink back to his padded chair in
SIGA’s corporate boardroom. Stern’s about-face, of course, had the effect of
proving the truthfulness all of the things that Stern and SIGA claimed were untrue.

Arianna Huffington

Check out these excerpts from Stern/SIGA’s “I'm
going to sue the f*ck out of you” letter, which was delivered to Arianna Huffington,
the Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post in 2010. "BARDA" is a federal agency that gave a half-billion dollar sole-source contract to Stern's company, SIGA.

For the reasons set forth below, the Companies insist that you withdraw
this article from your website and from your archive and that you post in its
place a one-line statement that the article was withdrawn because of errors.
The Companies further demand that you take all additional steps to have the
article removed from computer search engines and deleted by any licensees of
The Huffington Post…

First, a major thrust of the article is the implication that SIGA improperly
has been using Andy Stern's influence to obtain a BARDA contract and to prevent
the funds for that contract from being lost to budget-cutting. That implication
is false… [SIGA’s half-billion-dollar federal contract] procurement is not some
kind of government boondoggle…

Second, the article falsely implies that Mr. Stern did not have the best
interests of SEIU members in mind when negotiating labor agreements with AlliedBarton.
And it suggests that Mr. Stern's allegedly improper activities were at the
behest of MacAndrews & Forbes, which owned a majority of AlliedBarton at the
time, and its senior management, including Ronald Perelman. Those implications
are false…

The article should not remain posted on your website, and the Companies
hereby demand that you promptly remove it from the site and from archives, and
that you take all additional steps to have the article removed from computer
search engines and deleted by any licensees. In its place, the Companies hereby
demand that you place a single-line note explaining that the article was
removed because it contained errors. Thus, people who may try to return to the
article will know that it was removed for a reason. If you take these actions
promptly, my clients will consider the matter closed, but, if not, they reserve
all of their options and remedies. If you do not plan to comply, my clients
hereby also demand that you preserve all of Mr. Grim’s and The Huffington Post's
documents relating to this story, including all electronic documents, e-mails,
voicemails, and similar materials.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

According to an
article by the Huffington Post’s
Ryan Grim and Jeffrey Young, a "politically connected drug company" waged
"a high-stakes battle for federal funding" several years ago and
snatched up government money that otherwise would have gone to developing an “experimental
drug now being used by the U.S. government to treat Ebola patients.”

What's the name of this "politically connected drug
company"?

You guessed it. SIGA Technologies.

Here's what happened:

In 2010, the federal government awarded a nearly half-billion-dollar
contract to SIGA (which was developing a drug “in case terrorists weaponized
smallpox, a disease that was considered fully eradicated by the 1970s”) rather
than awarding the money to Chimerix,
which was developing "a broad-spectrum antiviral” medicine that the U.S. government
is now using on an emergency basis during the Ebola outbreak.

The Chimerix drug “was given in the late stages to Thomas Eric Duncan, the Dallas patient
who succumbed to Ebola in early October,” according to the Huffington Post.

The HuffPo article discusses the role of Andy Stern, SEIU’s President Emeritus, and his billionaire benefactor, Ron Perelman, in this tale of money, political deals and a lethal viral epidemic.

The bid for the
potentially multi-billion dollar government contract was ultimately won by Siga
Technologies Inc. in fall 2010. Just before the contract award, The Huffington
Post reported that Siga had brought on board Andy Stern, who had recently
departed as head of the Service Employees International Union. Having been the
lead labor negotiator on the Affordable Care Act, Stern knew his way around the
Department of Health and Human Services, which was to award the contract. Stern
and Ron Perelman, whose holding company had a potentially controlling ownership
stake in Siga, had long been on friendly terms, having become close after
negotiating union contracts when Stern was a labor leader.

After the story, Siga
threatened to sue HuffPost for reporting Perelman's ownership, which the
company said did not amount to a controlling stake. It was a critical
distinction, because Siga had bid for the contract as a small business.
Chimerix Inc., the rival bidder, challenged the awarding of a $2.8 billion
contract, arguing that Siga was not a small business, as the contract required,
because it was controlled by MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, the massive
company solely owned by major Democratic donor Perelman.

In November 2010, the
Small Business Administration ruled that Siga was in fact controlled by
Perelman's company and voided the contract. (Siga did not sue HuffPost and
declined to comment for this story; the law firm that wrote the letter
threatening the suit is now listed as an unsecured Siga creditor.)…

Instead of reopening
the bidding, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or
BARDA, asked Siga simply to submit a sole-source bid -- one that no other
company could apply for, arguing that Siga was the only company capable of
meeting the criteria.

SEIU's Andy Stern

Of course, SEIU’s Stern has a long and storied connection to
Perelman.

When Stern was the President of SEIU, he abandoned thousands
of low-waged security guards at AlliedBarton after he allegedly cut a backroom deal with their boss, Ron Perelman, according
to an earlier article by Ryan Grim in the Huffington Post. (“Andy
Stern’s Bizarre Alliance with Private Equity and Biowarfare,” October 7,
2010)

Then, just weeks after resigning as president of SEIU, Stern
was
placed on SIGA’s Board of Directors where he apparently was enlisted to use his SEIU rolodex and Washington, DC political connections to "dial for
dollars" on behalf of SIGA.

SIGA’s CEO said the following about Stern in a
press release:

Andy is a strong
leader and a great addition to our Board of Directors. His insight, experience,
and leadership, particularly his understanding of how our federal government
works, will complement the skill sets of our existing board members.

SIGA then rewarded Stern with tens of thousands of shares of stock
and hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash. SIGA reportedly mounted a full-court press for the half-billion-dollar federal contract, which later prompted
investigations into illegal
bid rigging by U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

And those aren't the only questionable connections between Stern
and his sugar daddy, Perelman.

SIGA’s majority owner also created and funded a custom-made
job for Stern – the Ronald
O. Perelman Senior Fellow at Colombia University's Business School in NYC
where Stern pulls down a handsome paycheck.

Last month, SIGA filed
for bankruptcy after a Delaware court ordered it to pay damages of $232 million
for ripping off another company.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Dave Regan’s cozy relationship with the hospital industry is
turning heads -- this time inside a football stadium.

In a recent article ("Dignity
Health Spends Big at Levi's Stadium," September 14, 2014), the San
Francisco Chronicle describes the public outrage after Dignity Health shelled out $2.5 million
for a luxury skybox at the San Francisco
49ers’ new football stadium.

Inside the air-conditioned suite, Dignity’s overpaid
execs are gorging themselves on trays of food and bottles of liquor as athletes
battle it out on the gridiron below.

Dignity’s skybox scandal appeared to offer a perfect
opportunity for SEIU-UHW to attack Dignity's pinstriped priorities. To use a
baseball metaphor, Dignity had served up a proverbial "softball" that
SEIU-UHW could hit out of the park. After all, Dignity recently demanded -- and Dave Regan accepted -- a wage freeze for all of SEIU-UHW’s 14,000 members at
Dignity.

Why, then, has SEIU-UHW been quiet as a church mouse about
Dignity's skybox scandal?

Sources say it’s typical of Regan, who has implanted himself
firmly in the Boss's pocket instead of at the side of workers. During recent
contract negotiations, Regan helped Dignity eliminate
workers’ defined-benefit pension and impose a
wage freeze on 14,000 SEIU-UHW members.

Sources also point to a second interesting explanation for SEIU-UHW’s
deafening silence: the gag clause in Regan's
new “partnership” deal with the California
Hospital Association, signed in May of 2014.

In an
internal SEIU conference call leaked to Tasty, Regan said the gag clause bans
SEIU-UHW from expressing any criticism or doing any "negative campaigning"
against hospital corporations. Here's what Regan said:

The Code of Conduct
requires that in all of our interactions -- whether they're in the public
realm, in the realm of advocacy, in the realm of media relations or press
relations or political work as well as in the realm of non-union workers
deciding whether or not to join our union -- we will eliminate and prohibit all
negative campaigning.

To reinforce the deal, Regan brought a top Dignity exec -- Wade Rose -- to speak about the terms of the "partnership" agreement at one of SEIU-UHW’s recent Executive Board meetings.

Hmmm… So how, exactly, are Dignity's workers supposed to get
any kind of justice from their

Skybox at the 49ers new stadium

multibillion-dollar employer if they can't utter
a single criticism about sky-high executive salaries, wasteful
spending, off-the-hook profits, and short-staffing?

Good question! It's like fighting a 300-lb. bully with both
hands tied behind your back.

And that's the bottom line. Regan has fixed the fight in the Boss's
favor. Which helps explain why Dignity workers' wages and benefits are suffering while their
company's profits are booming.

Several weeks ago, Dignity reported $913 million
in profits for the year ended June of 2014… with one economist criticizing nonprofit Dignity's sky-high profit margin of 8.3%. (Sacramento Business
Journal, "Dignity
Health Sees Healthy Growth in Profit Margin," September 25, 2014).

So... for all you 49er fans out there -- keep your eyes out for SEIU’s Dave Regan.
Tasty bets dollars to doughnuts he’ll soon be partying with Dignity's execs
inside their $2.5 million skybox!

In 2008, Regan inked an infamous back-room deal with CHP’s execs.
At the time, Regan was president of SEIU
1199 Ohio.

Under the deal, the company’s execs -- not the workers -- asked
the NLRB to hold unionization elections for 8,000 workers. And get this: the
Boss asked for only one union to be on the ballot: SEIU!

The backroom deal -- negotiated by SEIU’s Dave Regan, Scott Courtney and Mary Kay Henry -- ultimately led to SEIU's
violent attack on a Labor Notes
conference in 2008 that sent some conference-goers to the emergency room and
left David Smith, an SEIU homecare
worker, dead of a heart attack.

So why was CHP willing to ink a secret unionization deal with SEIU? Here's a clue.

In the first contract, SEIU negotiated ZERO improvements to
workers’ wages, benefits and working conditions. A company official described it
this way:

There are no separate
standards giving Union employees more money or rights and privileges than
non-union employees have in the workplace.

According to federal records, SEIU paid Burger a total of $551,145
in consulting fees during the two years following her resignation from SEIU after she lost an election to succeed Andy Stern.

More than $100,000 of this total was funneled to Burger
through a for-profit corporation that she set up at her home -- a company that appears
to have been designed specifically for that purpose (see below).

Here's what happened:

In April of 2010, Stern announced his resignation from SEIU,
thereby sparking a power struggle between Burger and Mary Kay Henry to succeed him. The following month, Henry won a
vote of SEIU’s International Executive Board and took over Stern's corner office at the Purple Palace.

In August of 2010, Burger -- who had continued to serve as
SEIU’s Secretary-Treasurer --announced her resignation from SEIU.

Stern and Burger

Days later, the purple gravy train began to flow -- not
directly to Burger, but instead to a company called “AB Action Now LLC,” which Burger registered at her home soon after
her resignation, according to incorporation documents from the District of Columbia.

Federal records show that SEIU delivered monthly checks
of $24,162 to Burger for nearly two years, which basically allowed her to duplicate the
quarter-million-dollar annual salary that she received before resigning her job as SEIU’s second-highest
officer.

The first $116,569 of SEIU's payouts came through "AB Action Now LLC." Later, SEIU made “consulting”
payments directly in Burger’s name and also sent them to Burger's home.

The payments raise interesting questions.

After the hotly contested 2010 election, Mary Kay Henry marginalized and fired a number
of Burger's supporters in a post-election purge, including one of SEIU’s Executive
Vice Presidents, Mitch
Ackerman.

So why did Henry pay more than a half million dollars to her
main rival for SEIU's top spot?

One possibility: the payouts were a kind of “hush money” to keep Burger from challenging Mary Kay Henry in SEIU’s 2012 officer
elections. In fact, Burger’s monthly $24,162 checks arrived like clockwork in
her mailbox until 2012. However, in June of 2012 -- when SEIU’s internal
elections had been completed and Henry had been elected to a full four-year
term of office -- Burger’s checks suddenly stopped, according to federal
records.

And, like so many episodes inside the Purple Palace, the payments raise obvious questions about SEIU’s top
officials... who appear to be far more comfortable hanging out with billionaires and funneling wads of cash to dummy for-profit companies than actually fighting corporations.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

There's an interesting wrinkle to the Andy Stern/SIGA Technologiesbankruptcy.

According to the Wall
Street Journal, SIGA filed for bankruptcy because it "doesn't have the
money to post the necessary bond for the full amount of the damages, plus
interest” …which total $232 million or more.

However, Stern’s billionaire patron -- Ron Perelman -- owns 24% of SIGA and could bail out the
company with a single swipe of his ATM card. After all, Perelman is one of the world's richest people and is worth
$14.4 billion!

So what's going on?

Tasty realizes that Andy is merely an errand boy for
Perelman. But hey, $232 million is just pocket change for cigar-chomping Perelman.

Here's what Bloomberg
reports about this made-for-TV drama about the latest chapter of their "bromance:"

The bankruptcy filing
also signals that billionaire Ronald Perelman, whose MacAndrews Forbes owns
about 24 percent of Siga, won’t bail the company out, Selvaraju said today.“He could have written
a check for the bond himself,” the analyst said.Christine Taylor,
Perelman’s spokeswoman, declined to comment on whether he considered covering
Siga’s bond liability.

Or is Andy hunkered down in his apartment nervously preparing a series of text messages to Ron design to carefully kiss his ass in preparation for the big ask: “Yo Ron, did I tell u that u r like totally the bomb!”

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